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Review: 'Pirates of Penzance' another gem by Lamplighters

By Pat Craig

Correspondent

Posted:
08/04/2014 12:32:33 PM PDT

Updated:
08/06/2014 09:23:19 AM PDT

This is how Gilbert and Sullivan should be presented -- wry, sly and bright as a summer day.

And this is how Gilbert and Sullivan is presented -- again -- by Lamplighters Music Theatre in its season-opening production of "The Pirates of Penzance," which opened in Walnut Creek's Lesher Center for the Arts last weekend. It next travels to Mountain View, San Francisco and Livermore.

After covering the San Francisco company that specializes in Gilbert and Sullivan works for nearly 20 years, it finally hit me why Lamplighters' productions are so much fun -- not only does the group regularly present a helluva show, but it creates a wonderful mood.

It occurred to me as the lights dimmed and the overture started, with glimpses of music director Baker Peeples' baton occasionally bobbing above the orchestra pit. I was transfixed and imagined myself a proper English gentleman of the Victorian empire. I wore mutton chops to match my jowls, my growing paunch strained the links of my gold watch chain, and all was right with the world.

The brief Britannia reverie faded as the lights came up, and life in the golden age of Jolly Old England began unfolding with equal parts silliness, cleverness, goofiness and gosh-darn patriotic nonsense. It begins with young Frederic (Samuel Faustine, in a revolving cast), completing his apprenticeship as a pirate and declaring he was not only leaving the pirate trade but as an honest gentleman, vowing to wipe pirates from the face of the Earth.

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The pirate band isn't pleased with this, but Frederic is an honest lad of 21, and he must follow his best instincts. As the pirates depart, he is left with his lifelong nursemaid, Ruth (Deborah Rosengaus), and figures he will marry her, if she is beautiful. She tells him she is, so Frederic says, OK, since he has never seen another woman.

But as fate, as it, would have it, Major-General Stanley's (F. Lawrence Ewing) daughters, in a seemingly endless array, visit the remote pirate seashore. Frederic is faced with dozens of beautiful young women, all flouncing across the rocky beach in hoop skirts, which look like bobbing, waist-high garden umbrellas.

And Frederic is smitten. He finally decides he will wed Mabel (Kaia Richards), much to the dismay of Ruth, who knows when she's been thrown over. She runs off to join the pirates.

All the pirates return and claim the daughters as their brides, since everyone knows pirates secretly long for domestic bliss when they are done pillaging. Major-General Stanley shows up and performs the patter song, "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" in a hilariously doddering way that sets the tone for his brilliant characterization and for the silliness of the rest of the show.

And the hilarity continues through a tangled jungle of crystal-clear but completely off-the-wall logic, buoyed by some excellent performances by the entire cast, especially the principals: Faustine, Richards, Rosengaus (who has a delightful sense of comic timing), Ewing (who makes me laugh every time he steps on stage), along with Charles Martin as the Pirate King, Chris Uzelac as the Pirate Lieutenant, John Rouse as the butler who makes Stanley look like an Olympic athlete, and Steve Goodman as the Sergeant of Police (along with the entire police crew, who are hilarious in a wacky sort of way).

Director Jane Erwin Hammett and music director Peeples have assembled a show that is a tiny masterpiece, one that should be seen by all, even if they've never heard of Gilbert and Sullivan. Or, perhaps, especially if they've never heard of Gilbert and Sullivan.